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We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Miruna Oprescu , Wen Sun , Kaiwen Wang

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell

Our work addresses a fundamental problem in the context of counterfactual inference for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Given an MDP path $\tau$, this kind of inference allows us to derive counterfactual paths $\tau'$ describing what-if…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Milad Kazemi , Jessica Lally , Ekaterina Tishchenko , Hana Chockler , Nicola Paoletti

We consider the expressivity of Markov rewards in sequential decision making under uncertainty. We view reward functions in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as a means to characterize desired behaviors of agents. Assuming desired behaviors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Shuwa Miura

We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Adapting an agent's behaviour to new environments has been one of the primary focus areas of physics based reinforcement learning. Although recent approaches such as universal policy networks partially address this issue by enabling the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Chenggang Wang , Roni Khardon

Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-17 Ignasi Clavera , Jonas Rothfuss , John Schulman , Yasuhiro Fujita , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

Designing a safe policy for uncertain environments is crucial in real-world control systems. However, this challenge remains inadequately addressed within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework. This paper presents the first algorithm…

In this work we investigate an importance sampling approach for evaluating policies for a structurally time-varying factored Markov decision process (MDP), i.e. the policy's value is estimated with a high-probability confidence interval. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-07 Carmel Fiscko , Soummya Kar , Bruno Sinopoli

This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Mengdi Wang

The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Linus Heck , Filip Macák , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges

Most reinforcement learning practitioners evaluate their policies with online Monte Carlo estimators for either hyperparameter tuning or testing different algorithmic design choices, where the policy is repeatedly executed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Shuze Liu , Shangtong Zhang

In adaptive systems, predictors are used to anticipate changes in the systems state or behavior that may require system adaption, e.g., changing its configuration or adjusting resource allocation. Therefore, the quality of predictors is…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Christel Baier , Sascha Klüppelholz , Jakob Piribauer , Robin Ziemek

Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Eric Yang Yu , Zhizhen Qin , Min Kyung Lee , Sicun Gao

We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-31 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford